Lemuel Washington, local fix-it man and inventor in the Village of Hmmm, is reasonably happy with his life of rigging teakettles to whistle ??You Give Me Fever and perusing his Reader s Digest Condensed World Literature collection. And if his sister, Shane, actually wins her race for mayor, she ll have to shut down the fortune-telling business she s been running out of her brother s garage and Lemuel might finally get some peace and quiet around his cottage. But then one dark and stormy night Chuck the Woodsman arrives with a gift from Lemuel s (very) recently departed hermit uncle Leonard: a presumptuous mixed animal (part badger, part pine martin, even part moonbat) named A.L.O.H.A. Turns out crotchety uncle Leonard was up to some amateur experimental science out there in the Unconscious Forest, and the impossible-to-pin-down creature is the result. As impossible as it may seem, there s more to A.L.O.H.A. than meets the eye, and peaceful, philosophical Lemuel gets dragged from one mind-boggling mystery to the next.